Today’s dose of life saving refreshes for me comes as always from the SQL land. At crisp, the authentication flows were based on user tokens delivered through authorisation headers. The token itself used to be computed at the application layer. When I started to rewrite an older project from scratch using MySQL for the database [and my data layer], was looking to see if this could be offloaded to the database layer. ...

Something I picked up during grad school, fell in love with since is TeX. So much so, I used it for drafting philosophy rants/rebuttals. Naturally, it was the choice whenever I generated resumes. Imo, for a non-Mac person, best choice. A few months back, I had shared my resume with someone who was impressed by the layout which looked more like it borrowed from a publication than a resume, and the bread crumbs I had for links at the top, they mentioned was interesting. ...

He did everything a cancer patient would have done to prevent a recurrence: He faithfully checked for the earliest signs of the disease returning, and minimized his risk factors. ... Not all cancers can be cured. Nor can all depressions. With the strong foundation of our love and his excellent care, my husband had almost 20 years of remission before succumbing to his disease. From this article, the best of my recent reads. A good chunk of it reverberates a little too close to my shoes; good enough to warrant multiple reads late last night. ...

Everyone optimises for one factor, or another in the scheme of things. What you optimise with a feverish pace, might not be another’s last priority to say the least. What one of them optimises might not feature in your rung of the pyramid. That’s fine, never a thing for you to ponder, let alone respond to. Do yourself a favour, and if you can afford to, build walls of glass. Let observations of the other side exist from either direction, at best. ...

And thus, PR #1 goes in (well, #250 because aap chronology samjhiye). Silly stuff aside, made the first set of changes to the Pubninja code base today, as an independent module. The good thing about the chronology now is an important discussion from last evening. From migrating the monolith to micro services and to what extent, to dev. disciplines. What stands out in all, is as much daunting as it seems looking at the meta of it, there’s acceptance and direction. So far, so very good I should presume, and hope it stays that way. ...

Seven years on since this; eleven since Heath and a longer seventeen since Nalla. The soul, Aurelius said, is stained in the colour of its thoughts. Fleeting, I wonder if mine would thus ever form a fresco panel; Nalla’s analogy of the bird and a wind carrying with it the fragrances and otherwise.

The best part of a day with visiting sinusitis has been discovering stuff. Stuff that I’ve been running behind for ages now. Sort of a holy grail if that rings a bell. Sat down late in the afternoon with an APM setup from last evening, trying to understand the API surface. After all, ought to get the picture of a well before one dives right in. My! what a wonderful liberating feeling in letting someone take care of your own messy work. I now understand how some might have felt, when I lugged their shit around. ...

aNNAvappa~NgAr’s episode about Swami desikan and peria AccAn piLLai is chronologically so inconsistent, one cannot avoid laughing hard. Now, that particular episode could be discounted as a random one or scrapped as interpolation in all earnest, if a section of the TK crowd did not use it to slander Swami desikan (and in a consistent manner, lest one forgets) This I guess is fair grounds to question the validity of certain cohorts within the school at large and their horrendous records/lines of argumentation. ...

Quintessential, apocryphal, and more, the validity and importance of this one can’t ever be overstated. More so, coming from an environment where tests lack were rationalized with flow tests but never the lack of documentation. These few days have been quite the culture shock, so much so, I wonder if I’ll last here long after this uphill a change; however dramatic it sounds.

Much unknown to many is the fact Crisp has entered an autopilot mode since January. We’ve moved on to others, while keeping tabs on certain internal changes. What a recent change to situations at my end gave way to, is the long pending changes to surface. Migrating the data pipeline which is one of the two “close to heart” components of Crisp, I’ve been working on and off. Late last week, sat with migrating the core of the pipeline to C++ and performance has been much on expected lines. Last September when I repurposed most of the content fetcher, we achieved a 50s running time. As much as it was good enough for running as a cloud function, the overheads of runtime were a point of contention. ...